Indian Express: Lucknow: Wednesday,
April 20, 2016.
While it is
yet to take a call on contesting the 2017 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, the
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has announced that it will contest the municipal
elections in the state, also scheduled for next year.
Preparing for
the polls to 14 municipal corporations in UP, AAP plans to target BJP, which
has mayors in 10 of these municipal corporations and is also a dominant force
in the civic bodies with large number of corporators from the party. The party
has decided to raise the issue of alleged corruption in the municipal bodies.
AAP workers
have already started filing Right to Information (RTI) applications seeking
details of expenditure in each municipal ward for various sanitation,
development and maintenance-related works in the last three years.
“The party
has filed nearly 250 such RTI applications with Lucknow municipal corporation.
We have received information about some wards in which corruption has been
found. For example, in one case, fund has been spent for development of a road
in ward a few months ago but that road does not exist at the site,” alleged
Vaibhav Maheshwari, state AAP spokesperson.
Maheshwari
said party workers are verifying the information being collected through RTI.
“Information received through RTI will not be disclosed before polls. A
compiled report for each municipal ward will be prepared with anomalies found.
These reports will be presented before the public during canvassing for
municipal polls,” said Maheshwari.
While Uttar
Pradesh has 635 urban municipal bodies, including 197 Nagar Palika Parishad and
424 Nagar Panchayats, the Aam Aadmi Party has decided to focus on 14 big
municipal corporations: Moradabad, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Saharanpur, Bareilly,
Agra, Firozabad, Aligarh, Kanpur, Jhansi, Allahabad, Lucknow, Gorakhpur and
Varanasi.
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